By the time the neon lights of Las Vegas are visible against the night sky this Friday, another Consumer Electronics Show will be over, having enlightened some 130,000 attendees, thanks to more than 1,000 speakers, 3,500 exhibitors, not counting the breakouts and shoulder programming by myriad companies and organizations, and 30 high profile keynoters – from CEOs of Accenture, NVIDIA, and Panasonic Holdings, and X, to SiriusXM – during the almost four day confab.

Spanning 2 million square feet of exhibit space and “campuses” from the convention center to the Cosmo, CES is the only trade show to cover the entire tech landscape at once. While “tech” brings IoT and EVs to mind for some, its impact on the entire entertainment industry, including media, gaming, and certainly adtech, is clearly evident. So are those blurred lines, as Netflix can be watched on your refrigerator and AI helps drive entertainment options in self-driving cars. So, the exponential increase of attendees in media and marketing is not surprising.

Emblematic of lines truly blurred, Delta Airlines CEO, Ed Bastian is tonight’s opening night must-see keynoter, given his is the first-ever CES keynote at the renowned Sphere and is also “opening” for Lenny Kravitz. (With the composition of this “techtainment” group of conference attendees, it will be hard to discern how many attend for Bastian versus Kravitz.)

Others rendezvoused, accidentally or on purpose, holding meetings over coffee at the Chandelier Lounge in the Cosmo, like Michelle Aragon, SVP Marketing at Spectrum Reach, or hometown friends coincidentally dining at adjacent tables, like AdLarge CEO, Cathy Csukas and DoubleVerify CIO, Jack Smith. By Monday, we got down to planned meetings.

Content and Creation Evolution

The increasing influence of tech on content and our very business models drove CES to launch C Space® around 20 years ago at the Aria, and the destination is a must-see – and be seen –for advertisers, media platforms and brands. Even the speakers scheduled at the C Space Studio are a techtainment soup: from Disney Advertising to NBCUniversal, but from Samsung Ads and Uber Advertising, too.

This focus on enhanced measurement and analytics reflects a broader transformation in research methodology across the media landscape. Major players at C Space demonstrated how AI is not just democratizing access to advanced analytics but revolutionizing contextual targeting. NBCUniversal, for example, unveiled new predictive ad models that use AI and machine learning to forecast creative performance – including an Olympic ad model powered by over 30 billion data points from more than 1,600 ads across four Olympic games.

The timing is particularly relevant as NBCUniversal gears up for NBC’s 100th anniversary in Fall 2026, with new engagement capabilities aimed at transforming how brands connect with audiences during premium live events. Their expanded Peacock features, including “Live in Browse” and enhanced Pause Ads (which drive 43% higher memorability compared to standard ads), represent the kind of innovation that’s reshaping both measurement and viewer experience.

Next Media Partners, LLC (NMP) introduced “Grayson” – their own virtual ambassador, who stood at the entrance to their Aria suite reminding attendees that “the future is conversational.” In fact, virtual Grayson was able to explain in easy-to-understand terms just how the company can augment retail media experiences with AR…. More on retail media and that crossover tomorrow!

Meanwhile another innovation in brand engagement comes from HOLOVISN, which wowed attendees with advanced 3D holograms that set a record for scale at the Sphere this past year. The technology offers greater energy efficiency than digital screens and claims to increase customer engagement by 300%, benefits that brands like American Airlines and Coca-Cola have leveraged especially with downstream business goals like app downloads and e-commerce purchases. But the company is also one of the anamorphic display creators exhibiting at CES, which is appealing to the many Out Of Home (OOH) vendors here.

Tech Transforming Efficacies

Once the bells and whistles are built in to the creative tactics, AI is further leveraged in ways that help brands and advertisers ensure they are connecting with and attracting audiences, even enabling them to produce customized content at scale in myriad formats and test the efficacies.

Largo.ai, for example, is promoting a new, rapid method of pre-testing those creative ideas for film or advertising projects using Gen AI plus human focus groups. (And that might be the first use of the word human here.) Quickplay, which just announced their “Shorts” tool, feels it will help streamers draw in and engage more with their subscribers. They envision broad adoption of clip creation with more TikTok-like short form content making its way onto streaming platforms. And Roku has become the first publisher to implement Innovid’s Harmony Reach & Frequency solution, collaborating through the Roku Data Cloud to optimize CTV advertising campaigns. The integration aims to help advertisers achieve incremental reach and improve campaign effectiveness by managing frequency exposure across streaming TV ads.

Jo Kinsella, Global President and COO of XR Extreme Reach, observed that “This year at CES, the conversation is shifting from media to creative, with a spotlight on how data and content are shaping business outcomes through greater resonance and personalization.” She sees AI and data at scale dominating discussions, particularly for their role in enhancing creative via deeper insights that help advertisers refine brand strategies to drive measurable wins.

On the AI meets adtech front, Viant’s 3,000 square foot space in the Aria underscored what many are calling the biggest launch in adtech history: using its advanced artificial intelligence, ViantAI, to redefine how digital advertising is being planned and purchased by delivering optimized data-driven campaigns at any scale. Tom Wolfe, SVP, Business Development, highlighted their recent collaboration with Disney as an example of driving greater value for advertisers through their Direct Access program, explaining, “We’re fostering more meaningful connections between our advertising partners and leading CTV content providers, leveraging the power of first-party data and streamlined supply paths.”

In the spirit of CES’s focus on data and AI-driven personalization, Disney is also launching Disney Compass, a groundbreaking, privacy-first tool designed to unify and activate Disney’s rich first-party data across a broad vendor ecosystem. “With the launch of Disney Compass, we are simplifying the complexity behind managing and utilizing first-party data,” said Nick Winfrey, Director of Data Science and Strategy. “With all critical data points available in one place, the possibilities for optimization and performance are endless.” At launch, Disney Compass connects with measurement and data partners like Affinity Solutions, LiveRamp, Snowflake, and VideoAmp, providing brands and advertisers powerful new avenues to harness unique insights. As CES continues to showcase game-changing technologies, Disney’s approach signals a new era of simplified, data-driven advertising options.

Beyond the Show Floor

As if thousands of exhibitors and wow-factor presentations weren’t enough, there are CES partners who host conference adjacent activations – and, of course, more entertainment to enthrall prospects and immerse them in promises of return on investments in immersive brand experiences.

Digital Hollywood kicked off the week with a pre-show day of panels on the merger of TV, AI, XR, Brand and Advertising, like a mini-CES itself for the Hollywood contingent. Their discussions included The Explosive Advertising Experience: AI + 3D + XR + Spatial, featuring Tony Gemma, VP, Global Head, Yahoo Creative, which perfectly preceded today’s announcement by CRO Rob Wilk on reintroducing Yahoo Ads and partnership deals with Jounce, Scope3, and others.

In a parallel Digital Hollywood panel, SVP of Addressable Sales for Disney Advertising, Jamie Power, shared enthusiasm, and hypotheses for the future of how “TV, Streaming & Advertising are Driving Dynamic Platforms with Dynamic Opportunities,” alongside Evan Giamanco, SVP, Digital Revenue Strategy, Warner Bros. Discovery, Danielle Carney, head of live sports and video sales for Amazon Ads, and Shannon Pruitt, CMO, Stagwell Brand Performance Network. “Consumers are immersed in sports; not just watching it,” Power pointed out. “It’s not just a game. We’ll work with different partners – Meta, YouTube – to make sure we’re programming that content, which is happening on different screens. and allow brands to move along with it, and have that conversation in different ways, which feels more organic than just running a thirty-second spot but have a more meaningful connection. That’s what’s exciting about 2025.”

For today, the real flurry begins as all exhibit hall doors are thrown open – from the innovators of Eureka Park to a convention center filled with, yes, AI-enhanced EVs (like Amazon’s new totally autonomous taxi, the Zoox, which will roam sans drivers on the streets of Las Vegas and San Francisco later this year). But, entertaining the minions will be the massive screens, the wearables that project captions into eyeglasses, and the haptic audio inventions that lets everyone hear, see and feel our content even more impactfully.

For tomorrow, I’ll share other areas in our media world touched by tech. Can you say, “Retail Media”?